Up to Date - 10/18/2010Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Lyndon Johnson scored a landslide Democratic victory in 1964. Eight years later Richard Nixon won an equally lopsided contest, and the years between were among the most chaotic in history: an unpopular war in Vietnam, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, and Southern resistence.

In his book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Richard Perlstein writes about the man who took the turmoil of the 1960s and turned it into a ladder to political notoriety.

Nixon pointed to riots, anti-Vietnam War protests and drug culture in convincing America that it needed to return to old-fashioned values and law and order. Perlstein says that Nixon created a new dividing line in the rhetoric of American political life that remains with us today.